Buddy purchased a phone off somebody who had the phone unlocked previously. He claims he plugged it in to iTunes and updated it (he has AT&T with an AT&T sim). After the update iTunes is saying "The SIM card inserted in this iPhone does not appear to be supported". The phone itself is stuck on "Emergency Calls Only".

I have tried everything I can think of off hand, including an incredible amount of research but nobody seems to have this problem on this firmware. Here's what I have done.

First thought, put the phone in DFU mode and restore to 3.1.2 official from Apple. He has AT&T and doesn't want it unlocked. That was a no go. The phone takes the restore but then goes right back to emergency calls only.

Second thought, custom firmware... but I could only find a 3.1 custom. Tried to restore to that and it fails before it even starts. Error 1600. Figured as much.

Third thought, with the 3.1.2 firmware already on it - let's try to jailbreak it with blackrain. It took the jailbreak, said it was complete. Restarted and put it back to the emergency calls only screen.

I have a PC running win XP, but I got ahold of a buddies Mac - tried to use QuickPWN but that said my firmware was not correct even though I tried 3.1.2 and 3.1 and neither took.

I always see the solution to put the phone in airplane mode, but this phone can't get past the emergency calls only screen. Anybody have any ideas what I can do to get this phone working?

Also try a custom firmware and hacktivate it to see if you can get to the home screen at least. But he will not get signal on ATT if you use hacktivation but this is just to see if it can get to the home screen.

Also try a custom firmware and hacktivate it to see if you can get to the home screen at least. But he will not get signal on ATT if you use hacktivation but this is just to see if it can get to the home screen.

I am going to try to hacktivate it now, just downloaded a custom 3.1.2 fw. Also, I was trying to activate using iTunes but even with my SIM card in my iPhone (which works fine) it was saying the SIM was not supported.

Well I downloaded a custom 3.1.2 firmware, put the phone in to restore mode (NOT DFU MODE, which I did the first 5x and kept getting the Error 1600 in iTunes), then restored through iTunes 9.0. After being jailbroke, I downloaded a custom lockdownd file and placed it in my usr/libexec folder using iPhoneBrowser. Restarted the phone and voila! home screen.

Now it just comes down to activation, that may be an AT&T issue more than an issue here. The iPhone at least works, boots up fine, and is jailbroke. I will deal with the rest of the stuff at a different time.

Thanks a lot for all the help, and I hope my information here can help someone else in a similar situation. Please make sure to check out my blackra1n post for the 3G iPhone if you are having trouble in the jailbreaking section.